New York Daily News Gives Late Statement On Months-Old Alleged Lucita Sandoval Hoax

This document is a 21 April 2015 email forwarded by Alan White to Tom Phillips and Craig Silverman with the subject “Fwd inquiry”, sent three days before BuzzFeed published its article about Central European News. It contains a fresh statement from Robert Moore of the New York Daily News saying the paper had purchased photos from CEN, worked to verify reports, and “quickly wrote an update saying that the whole story was hoax” after learning about alleged inaccuracies surrounding the Lucita Sandoval story. It is relevant because the New York Daily News had apparently already removed or updated its handling of the disputed story roughly five months earlier, after local and international online claims suggested the woman in the video was not the named Argentinian teacher and that the footage came from a different context. BuzzFeed’s April approach therefore appears to have been less a fresh act of original verification than a late-stage attempt to secure a retrospective statement from a downstream publisher shortly before publication. The chronology matters because the alleged hoax had not been proven by direct confirmation from the named woman, the woman in the images, police, school officials or anyone with first-hand knowledge; most publishers that carried the original report appear to have stood by it, while BuzzFeed was still using a disputed downstream correction as part of the wider case against CEN. It should be read alongside BuzzFeed_001804 and BuzzFeed_005578, which show BuzzFeed still trying to “nail down” CEN’s involvement and verify the Lucita Sandoval lead anecdote rather than having already resolved it at source.

Source

Part of Central European News & Mike Leidig v BuzzFeed (US Second Circuit Libel Case) – BF Case Documents

Europe Media Published 1 May 2026 at 21:09 Source: 1 November 2016